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Real History |
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By
James Burbeck
In the late morning of November 14, 1965, several
platoons of American troops landed by helicopter at a clearing located in the
Ia Drang River Valley, Vietnam. Over the next few hours they were followed by
more men from their battalion, the 1st of the 7th Cavalry, which was one of the
best trained and equipped air-mobile formations in the U.S. arsenal. They came
to fight the North Vietnamese Army on its own ground and opened that effort
with a visit to this clearing that was code-named X-Ray. The clearing was
figuratively in the front yard of a fully trained infantry division of
the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN). Weeks before, the North Vietnamese
commanders heard of the Seventh's deployment to their region and they were keen
to fight. They knew it would be necessary to fight bloody battles in order to
formulate countermeasures to the new techniques of waging air-mobile war. Both
sides received more than they expected though, for a battle developed which
quickly spiraled to a crescendo of violence not yet seen in the war. When it
ended almost 48 hours later, literally thousands of soldiers from both sides
lay dead in the hot tropical sun.
The first group compelled to take
their pulverized formations away from the X-Ray perimeter was the PAVN command.
Their troops had attacked in closed formations and been chewed to pieces by
machine gun and artillery fire. They achieved a measure of revenge in the
coming days when they caught a different American battalion as it rested along
a nearby jungle trail. However, that was another battle. The living, wounded
and dead of the first and second battalions of the US 7th Cavalry were flown
back to their bases, given fresh food and clothes, and reformed for another day
of fighting. The survivors of Landing Zone X-Ray have always had an aura of
fame about them. They fought in the first violent "stand up" fight of the war,
and they won... barely. Certainly both sides walked away from this fight with a
stronger respect for their opponents. Today, retired warriors from both sides
cooperate with mutual visits and research trips to help understand those few
days in late 1965.
The heroic acts that typified simple minute to
minute existence at X-Ray continue to be relived in the lives of the veterans.
For the very man who appears on the cover of the Ia Drang campaign book We
Were Soldier's Once... and Young, died in the September 11, 2001 attack on
the World Trade Center. Rick Rescola was vice-president for corporate security
for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and he ordered his employees in the South Tower
to evacuate despite official requests to remain in the building. He was last
photographed holding a megaphone, ordering his people to keep moving as they
evacuated. |
LZ X-Ray Map 1
LZ X-Ray Map 2
LZ X-Ray Map
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